Claudette’s kid…he took Chicago. So there’s a chance I’ll track down that doll Professor Replica is wearing there.

Any sane person would take the professor to a remote, hidden location with no ties to either of them and wait for Solaris to get bored.

Sometimes that even worked.

Still, there was a chance they had taken the professor to Chicago, aiming to lean on the advanced infrastructure that Paradox had built into it to weather Solaris’s fury and stage a counter-attack.

That line of thinking had never worked before, but it sure would make things go by quicker.

Whaddya know? Solaris mused as he walked through the silent, still city streets. He’s right here. That means this is probably a trap. At least they chose a quick death rather than dragging this out.

Paradox was frozen in place, helping Professer Replica to his – her – feet. A faint glow of magic emanated from his hand, seemingly trying to heal her. It wasn’t nearly fast enough.

The way Solaris saw it, the original Professor was dead, but before he died, he willed all his power, memories, and the title of Professor Replica to one of his unnatural creations.

In this case, a seemingly helpless young woman with a disarmingly innocent face. Calculated by the professor’s soulless ‘Command Center’ to maximize human’s protective instincts towards her.

Her gaze tracked Solaris as he approached, but she was still too injured to give herself the power to push past conventional physics and match his speed, only able to watch in horror as he strode up behind Paradox.

Solaris’s heart sank as he put two fingers to the back of Paradox’s skull.

Claudette was going to hate him forever for this, but Paradox was already gone. There was only mimic left in there. He couldn’t afford to give these mimics any more chances. They’d already demonstrated an unwillingness to turn against the Prime, and so they needed to be eliminated from the equation.

“Oy!” A voice caught Solaris’s attention.

Voice? He’d never heard anything at light-speed. It was outside the realm of what sound could accomplish. Therefore anything he heard now must be either a mental projections, or more likely…

A wildcard.

Solaris turned his head to spot a heavily sunburnt man wearing a tattered hat and cut-off jeans along with disintegrating sandals approached at a sprint.

Which was saying something, considering Solaris was already moving at lightspeed.

“Rack off, ya cunt!”

Ah. I recognize him. Australia Man, Solaris thought an instant before a bare foot caught his light-form in the chest and blew him away from Paradox at monumental speeds, cutting a Solaris-shaped hole in the nearby building as he flew.

Solaris dropped back into his physical form and tumbled violently for an instant before he stabilized himself in midair, the sizzling wound on his stomach flooding his body with pain.

Australia Man arrived in front of him, completely naked, save for the wide-brim hat artfully hanging over his crotch.

“Hello, Brian.” Solaris said.

“Tom! Welcome to the Australian Embassy!” Aussie Man said, spreading his arms wide to emphasize the surrounding city. “Chicago branch.”

Solaris glanced over at where Professor replica’s burns were sloughing off, revealing unharmed skin under Paradox’s spell.

The world shimmered a moment, and Chemestro appeared beside Australia man, followed by Marigold Zauberer, the immortal bitch.

Above him, the sky went black as a barrier that trapped light sprung up around the city.

“I guess we’re doing this,” Solaris said, loosening up his shoulders.

As far as traps went…this one wasn’t bad.

***Paradox***

“Let’s see if an Astra’s mending works on an Android,” Perry mused, triggering Sera’s Ouchie Corrector as he helped Professor Replica to her feet.

BOOOM!

Perry had the distinct sense of something whizzing by at irrational speeds.

He glanced over to see a white-hot section of perforated concrete in the shape of a man.

“Tom!” Perry heard Aussie man said through the Solaris-shaped tunnel in the building next to him. “Welcome to the Australian Embassy! Chicago Branch.”

Looks like Solaris is here, and I almost died, Perry thought, redoubling his efforts to get the Professor back to full speed.

Meanwhile, Perry pressed The Button. The Button caused a forced city-wide evac, and ritually sacrificed a litany of stuff to the Manitian pantheon. Blood for the blood god, wheat for the wheat god, money for the god of travel, baby teeth, hair, broken promises, and so on.

They were highly mechanized, with the prayers to Astra and Gyntax on a recorded loop that repeated so fast it sounded like a high-pitched whine.

The pressure of the blood entering the sacrificial pool could cut steel.

It was unconventional and geared towards speed over authenticity, but given who they were fighting, every femtosecond counted.

All that to say: ‘hey, we could use a little help here.’

The low-hanging cloud of divine energy that hung over Chicago like smog thickened, but nothing overt happened.

Hopefully they deign to give us the home-field advantage, Perry thought, tapping Professor Replica on the shoulder.

Stacy took a deep breath.

“I am free from the constraints of logic and nature.”

Stacy vanished, and the rapid-fire explosions in the distance grew even more furious, drawing a staccato rhythm across the domed city.

The battery buried deep under the city ticked up to 1% as it absorbed the side-effects of the fight, preventing the city from melting into slag even as they tossed each other across the city with enough force to wipe the place off the map.

We got this.

…Maybe, Perry thought as his armor closed in around him

Perry gave himself the role of support, rushing from place to place at supersonic speeds, putting out fires and evacuating civilians too stubborn or too stupid to move outside the danger-zone.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Solaris somehow got past both Professor Replica and Australia Man and nearly destroyed all the shield generators in a single go, and Perry had to patch them up while the fighting shifted further to the north, only traceable by the blinding light, like a comet fixing to explode in Earth’s atmosphere.

Perry juggled property damage like a champ, only stopping for brief seconds to refill his Essence at any station that Solaris hadn’t broken yet.

Meanwhile, Gramma floated in the center of the city, her lips moving silently as she cast massive curses upon the city, drifting like cobwebs in the air, designed to snag the Solaris Mimic and make him extraordinarily unlucky. Lethally unlucky.

Despite being indirect, It was the only attack she was sure she could land, so she did it without complaint.

Chemestro was performing admirable as a catcher’s mit, using some kind of predictive technique to head off the light-speed battle and use his phasing powers to minimize damage or grant Aussie Man an advantage.

Perry could only imagine how many subjective lifetimes they’d been fighting when Professor Replica dropped out of light-speed, panting desperately, her body covered from head to toe in bruises and scrapes.

“I can’t…” She gasped for breath. “I can’t keep this up. I’m using my power to boost my power. It can’t last forever.”

“How’s Solaris?”

She gestured to herself. “About half as bad. We’re not giving him any time to heal, but still…”

Stacy drew herself up, mastering her breath.

“I’m fine.” She said, and her body seemed to reset itself, all the wounds and fatigue flickering away between one instant and the next.

Then she was gone, and the fighting redoubled again.

Perry fumed, watching the arcing rays of light tracing themselves across the light-stopping sphere encapsulating the entire city.

It had been wildly obvious to Perry that Solaris had been toying with him in Franklin, just beating him around a bit to get information out of him…but this really brought it into perspective.

It was infuriating, being a spectator in the battle to determine your fate.

I just wish there was something I could do.

Out of the corner of his mind, Perry spotted one of Gramma’s causal cobwebs tighten, having snagged some possibility that was detrimental to Solaris, and was now reeling it in.

A blinking light in the corner of Perry’s HUD indicated that something odd was happening at the entrance to the city, which had been sealed and shuttered for a while now.

Evacuees were being shunted out with underground pods, the meters concrete only affording them modest protection against Solaris. But some was better than none.

The roads were completely unsafe, what with the sheer amount of heat and shrapnel being produced at a constant rate.

The weather outside right now could be likened to an abominous hybrid between an oven and a blender.

So who saw the black sphere around the city and was stupid enough to try to enter?

Actually, I was, when Franklin was cut off the rest of the world in a similar manner.

Perry switched the HUD in his suit to show him the camera.

Brendon, a little older than Perry remembered him, but still built like a tank and sporting a well-groomed beard, peered back at the camera.

“Is this thing on?” Brendon mused, glancing back down at the computer panel that controlled the massive gates. “Helloooo? Perry? You in here? Your dad said I should come visit? I forgot why…Did you break up with Heather or something? I brought some beers, but I gave most of them to some bandits I met on the way. Shutting yourself off from the rest of the world isn’t healthy, Perry. You…wanna talk about it? Or we could just play golf for an afternoon.”

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Perry demanded, glancing at his grandmother. The ancient witch merely shrugged and continued casting, continuing to chant curses under her breath.

Perry jetted over to his father, who was attempting to get the hang of his new body, and repeated the question, verbatim.

“He got eaten by a mimic.” Dad said with a shrug. “Twice.”

“Well, that’s just…” Perry paused and cocked his head. “Twice?”

Dad nodded.

An explosion of urgency rocked Perry’s world.

“Gramma, how fast can you summon someone’s soul from the dead? Does it take any paraphernalia or can you just whip it out?” Perry said, switching to gramma’s channel.

“Say the words ‘whip it out’ to me again, and you’ll find out firsthand,” Gramma replied over the comms, but Perry was already speaking to Gna’kis.

“Gna’kis, can you use one of Tyrannus’s long-range manifesters to put a syringe of the mimic test in my hand?” Tyrannus was the only one who could portal supplies in and out of the city without giving Solaris an exit.

“Sure.”

“Meet me at the front gate.” Perry switched to Gramma’s channel as a needle appeared in his hand.

In the distance, the fighting continued.

Brendon was standing in front of the gate, gawking at the massive black sphere that seemed to engulf the entire city.

Wonder what’s inside it? Brendon thought, taking a few steps back and craning his neck to try and see it all at once. It kind of reminded him of what people said Franklin looked like from the outside during the Gerome incident.

Maybe Perry finally Triggered after Heather left him. Brendon mused. That fit with what he knew about Perry.

“Hey buddy,” Brendon said, hitting the ‘talk’ button on the speaker again. “I know it hurts right now, but things get better. This is a low point, no doubt, but the only way to go is up…

No response.

“You can’t hold an entire city hostage because you got dumped. Even if Heather is more popular than you, and Pulse said you were a has-been. That’s the new super in franklin. He makes things vibrate. He tagged Heather on twitter, with the caption ‘I could-”

The door exploded open, revealing a black suit of armor that seemed to turn the world around it cold and lifeless as it charged towards him.

“EEEEP!” Brendon shrieked and flinched as the suit tackled him to the ground, brandished a needle and jammed it into his arm.

“I didn’t post it! Don’t kill the messenger, man!” Brendon shouted as a cold serum filled his arm.

“What are you talking about?” The suit’s modulated voice asked, cocking it’s head.

“Uuuummm. Nothing?”

The suit watched him as if expecting something. Whatever was in that syringe made Brendon jittery, almost like he’d knocked back a couple espressos, back to back, minus the anxiety and heart palpitations.

“Huh. Marigold, over here. Summon his soul from the beyond.”

“…What?”

“You’ll be fine.”

An old lady that Brendon had only seen a handful of times when he was younger arrived, wearing old-timey royalty stuff, just absolutely bedazzled with gold, gems, and fancy looking clothes.

She said some magic words over him, there was a ear-popping sensation, but nothing happened.

“Was something supposed to happen? Could someone tell me what’s going on?” Brendon asked.

“It’s him in there,” The old woman said.

“Dad said he was eaten twice.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I got eaten?”

“Did you get tricked into a private place by strange people who then turned into horrifying monsters that attacked you?”

“…Yes? Not really sure what happened after that.” Brendon admitted.

“Turn him into a frog.”

“What?” Brendon asked.

“I think I see where you’re going with this,” Marigold said as magic began to dance around her fingertips.

“Can we just talk about this?” Brendon pleaded.

The old woman spoke some magic-y sounding words and a bolt of green magic lanced into Brendon’s chest.

Everything went dark.

“Fascinating…” Brendon heard the old woman speak as he came to.

“Geez! What the heck!” Brendon said, sitting up off the ground and patting himself down to make sure he didn’t have slimy green skin.

“That’s an interesting Wildcard power. And it might be exactly what we need.”

There were four people hovering over him now: Perry’s dad and Dave the unicorn had joined the group.

There was also a dragon, but Brendon wasn’t sure if it identified as ‘people’. He glanced around, confused at the change in scenery, since they were underground somewhere.

The face plate of Perry’s armor flipped up.

“Brendon, did you know you have a superpower?”

“Hah. What? No. What?”

“Why do you think that you got paid ten grand an hour to push a cart around?” Perry asked.

“Because…they like me?” Brendon guessed.

“Because you will always be Brendon,” Perry said, poking him in the chest. “Regardless of external or internal weirdness. A normal person would’ve been horribly mutated if they worked where you worked.”

“My hypothesis is that once the mimic consumed him, it duplicated his power, which went on to erase any…mimic-ness present and restored his soul. His power overwrote the mimic that copied it.” The dragon spoke, it’s voice violently rattling Brendon’s prey response. “A very…valuable effect.”

As the massive scaly head with teeth bigger than Brendon’s palm leaned in closer, Brendon bolted. He scrambled up and dove for the exit, only to find himself floating in midair.

“Chill out, Tyrannus isn’t gonna hurt you.” Perry said as Brendon tried to swim through the air.

Once his heart rate was closer to room temperature, Perry set him down.

“Well…We may have to dissect him a bit to understand his power. I wouldn’t exclude the possibility.”

Brendon bolted again.

“You’re not dissecting my friend. We’re gonna find a way to isolate and reverse engineer its effects without hurting him.”

“Is he more important than the world at large?” The dragon asked.

“The more important question is this:” Perry asked, standing directly between Brendon and the dragon. “Could you beat me?”

“Enough!” The old woman said, waving her hand dismissively. “I’ve cast a time dilation on the surroundings, but it does not stop it, and time is not our friend right now. We will pursue every method to replicate this anomoly we possibly can, starting with non-destructive means. But I won’t rule anything out. Sometimes sacrifices must be made. Is that understood, Paradox?”

Brendon watched as Paradox’s helmet flipped back down, modulating his voice.

“I understand that if I killed you, it would give me enough power to solve the mimic problem. Do sacrifices have to be made?”

The tension between the five ‘people’ present could be cut with a knife as Marigold’s eyes narrowed.